Paul Beier Lab of Conservation Biology & Wildlife Ecology

Current Projects

CorridorDesign.org
provides information on designing wildlife corridors, including
several ArcGIS toolboxes with good documentation written in
plain English. The tools are free; they were designed by
Dan Majka,
Jeff Jenness,
Brian
Brost, and Paul Beier. At the CorridorDesign site you can also find linkage designs for 16
corridors in Arizona. Visit
scwildlands.org to
download linkage designs for 11 wildlife linkages in
California's South Coast Ecoregion, 22 linkage designs in the
Mohave Desert, and ongoing work in the San Francisco
Bay Area.

What characteristics are associated with successful
conservation corridors?A conservation corridor is
a long, wide swath of natural land proposed as conservation
intervention to promote genetic and demographic flows between large natural areas that would otherwise be separated by
human-dominated matrix. Unfortunately, most corridor research
has studied animal movement & presence (not gene flow) via short
narrow corridors in natural matrix. For this project, led by postdoctoral scholar
Andrew Gregory, we are desperately seeking stable, 50-year old
landscapes with long wide corridors. Please read this
paper in
PLoS Biology to to learn more, or visit
our website to
suggest a good field site.

Climate-savvy conservation - without
climate models! Our lab is helping to develop
approaches to coarse-filter conservation for climate change.
Rather than trying to model range shifts for every species (a
gargantuan effort that uses highly uncertain emissions scenarios
to drive highly uncertain general and regional circulation
models to drive highly uncertain species-specific climate
envelope models that produce outputs at > 4x4-km resolution, and
then combining dozens of these single-species models to
inform conservation decisions) we propose coarse-filter
conservation plans using 'land facets' or 'geophysical land
units.' The idea is to conserve the arenas of evolution and
biological diversity rather than the specific actors temporarily
occupying those arenas. Mac Hunter's
seminal 1988
paper introduced this idea, which lay dormant until 2010
when our
paper and a paper by
Mark
Anderson & Charles Ferree of The Nature Conservancy
re-launched it. We have developed specific procedures to
apply
this approach to the design of wildlife linkages.

Population
genetics, occupancy modeling, and habitat modeling of grizzly
bears in Montana. Tabitha Graves, PhD student.
supported by the National Science
Foundation (Rigorous estimates of landscape resistance to gene
flow), NAU School of Forestry, USGS, and partners of the
Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project.

Do hiking and biking
harm wildlife? PhD dissertation project lead by
Michelle Reilly.
This research will determine whether certain levels of hiking
and bicycling in natural areas have significant impacts on
habitat use by carnivores, deer, and other wildlife in the San Francisco Bay Area
Ecoregion. Study sites will span the full spectrum of
non-motorized recreation and other variables that could obscure
or exaggerate the effects of recreation. The study will produce
recommendations to locate trails and manage hiking in a way that
does not degrade habitat value of protected area

Estimating resistance to gene flow across a gradient of habitat
fragmentation, PhD dissertation project led by Annika Keeley.
Resistance represents the hypothesized relationships between
landscape features (e.g., land cover, urbanization, distance to
edge) and gene flow. Resistance is inherently species-specific.
This study will determine whether it is also landscape-specific,
i.e. whether resistance values of landscape features change with
the amount of preferred habitat and the extent to which
preferred habitat is fragmented.

Associations between landscape
patterns and Mexican Spotted Owls on tribal and US Forests.
PhD dissertation project led by Serra Hoagland.
Serra's study sites will probably include Mescalero Apache and
Lincoln National Forest. Serra's dissertation will also have a
chapter related to science translation that will include
traditional ecological knowledge. email Serra and sjh285 (at)
nau.edu.